SIGdial 2018

19th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue

Role play-based question-answering by real users for building chatbots with consistent personalities

Ryuichiro Higashinaka, Masahiro Mizukami, Hidetoshi Kawabata, Emi Yamaguchi, Noritake Adachi, Junji Tomita

Having consistent personalities is important for chatbots if we want them to be believable. Typically, many questionanswer pairs are prepared by hand for achieving consistent responses; however, the creation of such pairs is costly. In this study, our goal is to collect a large number of question-answer pairs for a particular character by using role playbased question-answering in which multiple users play the roles of certain characters and respond to questions by online users. Focusing on two famous characters, we conducted a large-scale experiment to collect question-answer pairs by using real users. We evaluated the effectiveness of role play-based questionanswering and found that, by using our proposed method, the collected pairs lead to good-quality chatbots that exhibit consistent personalities.